


under the blankets, nobody'll see

by CreamEgg



Category: Skins (UK)
Genre: Brain Damage, F/M, Incest, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 07:56:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4698242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CreamEgg/pseuds/CreamEgg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony is new, remade, a different kind of broken. Effy isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	under the blankets, nobody'll see

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aphrodite_mine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphrodite_mine/gifts).



So, in primary school, they got given pea plants. A pea plant, a pot, a stick and instructions to watch it grow over the summer holidays. Six solid weeks of sun (as much as England could yield), rain from a stemmed can, and careful notes in a book decorated for the purpose with flourishing green shoots.

Effy left it for weeks. Left the pea seed to wither, the compost to decay, the notebook untouched. There were streams to dredge, things to see, and she'd never allowed anything as stupid as school to interfere with anything she'd wanted to do. Of course the end of the summer approached, and the spectre of the school report, and she wasn't that independent, not just yet. Hadn't entirely lost the ancient teacher-fear.

It was Tony who bought her a pea plant from a nursery and taught her to lie about watching it grow. Tony who turned her hurried falsehoods into a patchwork weave of observed reports. He put lies in her mouth and watched them grow, until they blossomed out like no pea plant ever would under her hands. She shut her mouth on them, swallowed them back, until they grew in her heart, not on her tongue.

He benefits now. Maybe he'd benefit more if he'd taught her to care for broken things, but he didn't.

She watches him. There's something rich and strange, growing in her brother's bed, and she has an up close seat to watch it happen. "Shh," she whispers, against his ear, and he quietens only for her, a singular docility that would worry her if he ever showed it to anyone who wasn't her.

For so long her lips had been sealed, that she understands the way he moves, the sheen of night fear on his skin, without any need for words. Lies beside him at night and listens to the soft, regular breaths, that are the only certain things in both their worlds. She strokes her fingers over his face and imagines the veins underneath, the arteries pumping blood through him, enriched by the pills he chokes down. Infuses life into him, feels their hearts beat in time, a shared rhythm that is as much him steadying her, as her guiding him.

He smells the same, underneath it all. Paco Rabanne has been replaced with talc, the bitter ooze of meds and the sharp negatory smell of unscented deodorant, but the sweat smell is the same, the base note of his skin, familiar to her as her own, and the way it intensifies as they lie pressed together, the heat doing its work.

She knows he'll get better. He might be only half Tony Stonem, but Tony is only ever half of TonyandEffy - and she has enough to spare, yields some few of the secret bits of herself up, though never even close to all. Talks aloud in the darkness and feels his eyes watch her, thumb stroking regular over her thigh, warm trace of touch. _Tony_ , she thinks, and goes back to telling him about what it feels like to be so high that she wants to shred her skin and step out of it, leave it behind and run naked to the bone through Bristol. No secrets, nothing to hide. Long, dark, slow talk, that's as much a secret as the things she says. Who knew she had the words, she thinks, Tony had always been the talker, the shouter, the liar, the braggart. Maybe some slow osmosis had occurred, some mysterious transference between their flesh, force of proximity prompting the swap. Whatever it is, she licks the bitter taste from her lips, and strokes her fingers through his heavy hair, wills him strength through the same medium.

One night she names him all the things he is, and he listens to the uncomplimentary spiel with careful attention, storing it all up, pieces in some puzzle that's beginning to take shape. _You forgot handsome_ , he interjects, and she could kiss him for it, if it wouldn't encourage him in his delusion.

Instead she lets her silence speak for itself, feels the laugh shake through him, only half there but it feels like a win.

Effy doesn't nurture, and she's never wanted to. After all pea plants die in her hands. When she was a kid, dolls found homes in landfills once their heads came off, friendships withered with terrible ease, her family falls apart. It provokes detached interest mostly. She's not even very good at sharing, the way siblings are meant to. Never saw any cause - Tony would take more than his share, no need to look out for his interests that was for sure. A careless greed, motivated by no malice, but a greed nonetheless. Some people have green fingers, healing hands, not Effy. She thinks her qualified success in the Great Case of Tony owes more to that integral Stonem selfishness than any late grown virtue.

It works, mostly. There's bad days and worse days, and some days where he shakes too much to touch anything, even her. She thinks the only other one who kind of gets it is Maxxie, nothing pitying in the way he looks or touches, the only one who knows how much that would hurt, how little Tony could forgive. But it's not Maxxie who's there at nights, it's Effy, and it's their secret, the slow build of a new world with a Tony shaped place in it.

She doesn't mean the way it happens, but it's never been her style to make excuses. She thinks at first that he thought she was Michelle. Maybe there was some sense-memory there, some shared moment of a too-close bed, press of arm against arm, skin against skin, but whatever it is, he opens his mouth against the exposed skin of her arm and flashes his tongue over it, short quick shiver of feeling, catches at the flesh with his too soft lips, and she lies death still, gazes unseeing into the blackness. Doesn't tell him to stop, not while he does only this, hot puff of air against her, warm flicker of mouth, sweet like seaside candy. His mouth is more dexterous than his hands. 

"I'm Effy," she whispers. Not Michelle. Not Cassie. Not Maxxie even. She says it as much to reassure herself, to stop bits of her from floating away. It's just the expressed words of a bone deep feeling. _I'm me_ , she thinks, projects it with the full force of her will, eternal hymn of self, sung unendingly inside her.

There's silence, and he releases the gentle grip of his teeth, dampness of his breath staining her skin. "I know."

She can feel the outline of his mouth on her arm, cooling in the air. "Don't forget." It's as much for her as it is for him, a partial reassurance as to existence. 

The problem Effy supposes, is that if she acknowledges to herself that she can't want this Tony, it's tantamount to suggesting that there _is_ a Tony she could want. Older liar, fingers in mouth digging out the truths and twisting them. She wants him, like they all do, and it burns that she could have him, but only now. Tony bites down hard then, teeth in the bend of her elbow, sharp, shocky burst of pain, blunted by the hard grip of his mouth. "I can hear you," he whispers, and she doesn't doubt the truth of it. "I don't blame you," he says, "I wouldn't want this either." Like he's a shell, a piece of meat, a fractured bone laid across a plate, unwanted dinner, and she feels a great swell of laughter surge up inside her, at the careful instinctive calculation of sadness in his voice. 

"You manipulative fuck," she says, and creases up from the pain of keeping the giggles inside. There's never been any need to allot Tony his share, he'll take it and more if he can get it. She can't see the offended hang of his mouth, the re-born touchiness of his pride. There's not a mention between them both of everything that's wrong with his proposition, that it's been made is proof enough of their fundamental failure to adapt themselves. She rolls over on her side, gazes into the shadowed hollow of his face, and kisses the dent of his cheek. "It can wait."


End file.
